SC249-4

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56958.htm

Pentagon Fails Audit (Again!)

That’s what should have been the biggest news of 2021.

Instead, the story, which broke on November 17, was largely ignored or buried. The nation’s two main newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, have simply ignored it. Other news organizations stenographically quoted Pentagon officials as admitting that they “failed again” but saw “progress,” and as promising that they would achieve a “clean” audit by… get this … 2027.

The Pentagon, with some $3 trillion (give or take a trillion but who’s counting?) in assets and a record current 2021 budget of $738 billion, has for the third year in a row failed its audit. An army of 1400 auditors hired by us taxpayers for $230 million and borrowed from some of the biggest auditing firms in the country, spent the past year poring through the books and visiting hundreds of operations of the government’s largest and geographically vastest single agency, and came back with word that they couldn’t give it a pass.

They couldn’t even figure it out.

Think about that for a minute. The US military, which each year sucks up close to half of the nation’s now $1.6-trillion discretionary budget, is a financial black hole! Nobody in the White House Budget Office, the Congressional Armed Services or Budget Committees, the General Accounting Office, or in the Pentagon itself, can say with a straight face how much the Pentagon spends of all the funds it is allocated by Congress each year, where that money gets spent, of even where all the equipment it buys — planes, ammunition, bombs, ships, etc. — are currently.

Perhaps more important in the long term, nobody anywhere in the government can honestly say how much the Pentagon actually needs each year, even according to the trumped up claims made in each year’s proposed Pentagon budget.
 

That in itself explains why the Pentagon budget just keeps growing. Look at this year, for example, where Congress actually handed an extra $53 billion to the nation’s military, over and beyond the $715 billion that the Pentagon and the Biden Administration asked for. The just adopted FY 2022 budget, called the National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) is, incredibly, larger in constant dollars than any year since World War II. That is to say, it is greater adjusted for inflation than it has been for any year during the Korean War, the entire Cold War, or the Vietnam War (when the US at one point had over 500,000 troops in battle, a huge US Navy Pacific fleet in the South China Sea and half the US Air Force, including a large portion of the Strategic Air Command’s B-52s, busy with carpet bombing and napalming attacks halfway around the globe). Meanwhile, the US at present is not, in any significant way, involved in an actual war anywhere.

In 2019, when I exposed in a Nation MagazIne cover story the incredible $21-trillion fraud that has been going on at the Pentagon for over two decades of deliberate budget obfuscation, I wrote that if this kind of scandalous behavior were occurring in any other government department (with the possible exception of the sacrosanct CIA and National Security Agency, which of course have actual “black” budgets not seen by either press or Congress), it would be huge news in the media, and would prompt angry hearings in Congress. Imagine, for example, if the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, or perhaps the Department of State couldn’t pass an audit! Even though the amount of money at issue would be orders of magnitude lower, there’d be hell to pay. Department secretaries or agency directors would lose their posts and their reputations, and members of Congress would be demanding prime time opportunities denounce the scandal on the floor of the Capitol, and the media would be all over it.

But the fact that the Pentagon can’t explain what it is doing with the 50 cents on every dollar of taxes that American’s pay to the Treasury each year from their hard-earned paychecks, and has made it so that no government office can figure it out, either, and the reality that Congress keeps on shoveling more and more money into the five-sided black hole across the Potomac River, year after year, should have the whole nation up in arms.

Right now, the US is midway through spending $1.7 trillion buying and upgrading “on the fly” thousands of F-35A allegedly stealth fighter-bombers which can’t do what they’re supposed to do, aren’t needed for any kind of war that the US is likely to ever get involved in (that would be with Russia or China, the only countries with advanced aircraft, but which would both end up in an all-out nuclear war with the US if it ever came to direct combat), and which will probably end up being replaced with something more expensive and pointless before they’re all built.

The US is also well into another $1.5-trillion pointless and destabilizing program begun during the Obama administration to “upgrade” and “modernize” the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

That is, instead of sitting down with the world’s other eight nuclear powers and seriously negotiating a denuclearization of all our nuclear arsenals, and eventually signing on to the UN ban on nuclear weapons just approved a year ago by a huge majority of the nations of the world and made a part of the laws of war, the US is working on developing and pre-positioning around the globe bombs that are considered small enough to be “useable” in non-nuclear conflicts.

I’m talking about bombs that are downsized from megatons to anywhere from 0.3 kilotons (just 300 tons of dynamite equivalent) to 50 kilotons (about three times the size of the bomb that leveled Nagasaki).

“Useable” nukes they call them!

Instead of looking for ways to pull the US out of provocative locations around the globe where all it has been able to do since the end of WWII with its awesome weapons, enormous Navy and huge standing military is sow instability, support violent coups, invade countries that don’t do the US’s bidding and drop bombs, drone-fired rockets and send in Special Forces troops in countries that the US has no right to be in (think Syria, Somalia, Niger, Haiti, Yemen, Iraq, etc.), President Joe Biden is now considering sending weapons and trainers to Ukraine, missile-carrying destroyers into the Black Sea off Russia’s coast, attacking Iran (or allowing Israel to do the dirty work), provoking China in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, and who knows what else.

Biden can do this because, for the Pentagon, money is no object. The Pentagon gets whatever it wants even though it cannot tell anyone, and probably doesn’t itself know, where the money all goes.

My computer screensaver image is a photo of a sea of young people, mostly young men, myself included, seated on the Mall of the Pentagon in October 1967, confronting a double line of rifle-toting federalized troops. Back then we were demanding an end to what we in the US still call the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese call it the American War, which, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, they ultimately won). That protest and others that followed it made a hell of a lot more sense and would be vastly more appropriate and important if reprised today, than the bunch of fascist yahoos who busted into Congress a year ago on January 6 trying to hang Vice President Mike Pence and install presidential election loser, Donald Trump, as the nation’s Major Domo.

I hope people will ponder this question.

Why are we allowing this outrage to continue?

....

https://www.globalresearch.ca/stigmatizing-unvaxxed-unboosted/5766302

Stigmatizing the Unvaxxed and Unboosted. “Mass Formation Psychosis”. “You’re a Criminal Because You’re Unvaccinated”

You know you’ve entered a twilight zone of insanity when a police officer tells you you’re a criminal simply because you’re unvaccinated. That’s exactly what happened the other day in Germany. The police officer insisted the unvaccinated man was “a murderer” because he “might infect someone,” and that he’s “not a human.”

The bizarre altercation was posted on Twitter December 12, 2021, (see above). In response, the unvaccinated man tells the cop he’s the one who has “lost all humanity.” Indeed. Who thought we’d ever see the day when individuals are marked as “murderers” and “not human” based on vaccination status alone?

It’s beyond irrational. But then again, insanity does not obey reason, and according to professor Mattias Desmet, a Belgian psychologist, the world has indeed been hypnotized into a state of mass psychosis.¹

“Mass formation psychosis” is the explanation for how the Germans accepted the atrocities by the Nazi party in the 1930s, and it’s the explanation for why so many around the world support medical apartheid and the dehumanization of the unvaccinated now.

You Cannot Comply Your Way Out of Tyranny

The stigmatization and dehumanization of the unvaxxed is all the more irrational when you consider that the COVID shot doesn’t prevent infection or spread of the virus. Those who have received one, two or even three doses are STILL contracting the infection, and at ever-increasing rates, and are spreading it to vaxxed and unvaxxed alike.

Outbreaks among “fully vaccinated” populations, isolated on cruise ships, for example, have occurred on several occasions, proving the shots fail to prevent outbreaks. The COVID-jabbed are clearly just as “dangerous” and likely to “kill” their fellow man as those who are unjabbed.

When either decision — the decision to get the jab or decline it — results in you posing the exact same level of risk to others, how can anyone say that one is more dangerous than the other? Anyone still capable of clear, level-headed thinking will see that it doesn’t add up.

Unfortunately, most countries are experiencing a mass delusional psychosis. They have been manipulated into believing highly irrational absurdities. The same psychological operation was at work in the 1930s, when Jews, the old and infirm, and the mentally and physically handicapped were dehumanized and blamed as carriers of disease and other social ills.

In the short video above, Auschwitz survivor Marian Turski, now 94 years old, describes the incremental dehumanization and ostracizing that took place in Nazi Germany, ultimately ending in the Holocaust. Now, we stand before the same fork in the road yet again. Many, like the German police officer, are choosing the well-trodden road of repeated history.

Stigmatizing Unvaccinated Is Unjustified

November 20, 2021, The Lancet published a letter by Gunter Kampf, titled “COVID-19: Stigmatizing the Unvaccinated Is Not Justified.”² “In the USA and Germany, high-level officials have used the term pandemic of the unvaccinated, suggesting that people who have been vaccinated are not relevant in the epidemiology of COVID-19,” Kampf writes.

Official Narrative Admits Fake COVID Vaccine Gives You Fake COVID Immunity

However, he adds, “There is increasing evidence that vaccinated individuals continue to have a relevant role in transmission.” He goes on to cite statistics from Massachusetts, where 469 new COVID-19 cases were identified during July 2021. Of those, 346 (74%) were either fully or partially jabbed, and 274 (79%) were symptomatic.

People who are vaccinated have a lower risk of severe disease but are still a relevant part of the pandemic. It is therefore wrong and dangerous to speak of a pandemic of the unvaccinated. ~ Gunter Kampf

The cycle threshold values used during PCR testing were also similarly low regardless of COVID jab status (median 22.8 cycles, which minimizes the risk of false positive results), “indicating a high viral load even among people who were fully vaccinated,” Kampf notes. These data are clear evidence that the COVID jabs cannot end the pandemic, and may in fact be preventing it from dying out naturally. Kampf continues:³

“In the USA, a total of 10,262 COVID-19 cases were reported in vaccinated people by April 30, 2021, of whom 2725 (26.6%) were asymptomatic, 995 (9.7%) were hospitalized, and 160 (1.6%) died. In Germany, 55.4% of symptomatic COVID-19 cases in patients aged 60 years or older were in fully vaccinated individuals, and this proportion is increasing each week.

In Münster, Germany, new cases of COVID-19 occurred in at least 85 (22%) of 380 people who were fully vaccinated or who had recovered from COVID-19 and who attended a nightclub.

People who are vaccinated have a lower risk of severe disease but are still a relevant part of the pandemic. It is therefore wrong and dangerous to speak of a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

Historically, both the USA and Germany have engendered negative experiences by stigmatizing parts of the population for their skin color or religion.

I call on high-level officials and scientists to stop the inappropriate stigmatization of unvaccinated people, who include our patients, colleagues, and other fellow citizens, and to put extra effort into bringing society together.”

Human Today, Not Human Tomorrow

It’s important to realize you cannot comply your way out of this tyranny. If you choose to get the COVID shot because you don’t want to be stigmatized, there can be no end to your compliance to future boosters, no matter what the cost to you or your family.

In short order — a handful of months at most — you will suddenly and arbitrarily be deemed an unvaccinated menace to society again, even though you’ve already had one, two or three kill shots.

None of that will matter. You get no brownie points for past compliance. At six months past your second or third dose, your status will go from green to red, from human to not human, literally overnight. You’re “unvaccinated” again, until or unless you get another booster. This cycle will continue until you’re dead. Are you game? Is that how you want to spend the rest of your life?

COVID Shots Keep the ‘Pandemic’ Going

More than 80 studies have confirmed that natural immunity to COVID-19 is equal or superior to what you get from the jab.⁴ This conforms to well-established medical science, so it’s no surprise. It’s as it should be.

But for the first time in modern medical history, natural immunity is being portrayed as having no benefit whatsoever. Even worse, those with natural immunity are being labeled as dangerous and are shunned and even fired from their jobs for failing to get a shot.

Only the jabbed are protected and can protect others, health authorities now claim — even though it’s those with natural immunity who are most protected and don’t pose a risk to others.

The reality and truth, though, is that natural immunity is long-lasting, protects against all variants and will not contribute to the creation of variants. The same cannot be said for the COVID jab. We now have clear evidence the shots offer, at most, six months’ worth of protection, after which the relative risk reduction drops to zero.

As just one example among many, a Swedish study⁵ published October 25, 2021, found that while the jabs initially lowered the risk of hospitalization, their effectiveness rapidly waned.

• The Pfizer jab went from 92% effectiveness at Day 15 through 30, to 47% at Day 121 through 180, and zero from Day 201 onward.
• The Moderna shot had a similar trajectory, being estimated at 59% from Day 181 onward.
• The AstraZeneca injection had a lower effectiveness out of the gate, waned faster than the mRNA shots, and had no detectable effectiveness as of Day 121.

This and other studies showing waning immunity were discussed in a December 9, 2021, New England Journal of Medicine interview.⁶ As noted in that interview, the Delta variant, which is significantly different from the initial SARS-CoV-2 strain, can infect fully jabbed individuals, and its ability to do so increases over time, as the effectiveness of the shot rapidly wanes.

Aside from waning efficacy, the fact that the virus is mutating within “vaccinated” populations also forces it to develop the capacity to circumvent the COVID jab. In short, the deck is stacked against those who rely on the COVID shot to protect them. In the long term, it’s a hopeless situation, as we cannot inoculate our way out of an endemic with a product that doesn’t prevent infection and spread!

Sadly, NEJM, rather than promoting science, toes the line of the official mainstream narrative and suggest boosters are the answer. They should know better, which raises suspicions that conflicts of interest likely impact their clinical judgment.⁷

Lindsey Baden, one of the interviewees, has received grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust — three institutions that more or less openly support medical tyranny and totalitarian rule by a biosecurity-based police state.

The Gravity of Our Situation

In the video above, Dr. Chris Martenson interviews Desmet about the gravity of our situation, seeing how it’s rooted in a grossly self-destructive psychiatric condition — and one that permits totalitarianism to flourish.

According to Desmet, the mass formation psychosis now appears so widespread that global totalitarianism may be unavoidable. He believes it’ll take over, as we’re seeing in a number of countries already.

The German police officer denouncing the humanity of the unvaccinated is a shining example of the brainwashing propaganda that supports and strengthens the totalitarian state, and allows inconceivable atrocities to be committed in broad daylight. The question is, what can we do to limit the damage?

First and foremost, we must continue to provide true and accurate information to counter the false narratives. Some who aren’t yet fully hypnotized may still be routed back to sanity. Speaking out can also help to limit the atrocities the totalitarian regime is emboldened to implement, because in totalitarianism, atrocities and crimes against humanity increase as dissent decreases.

We can also substitute fear of the virus narratives with narratives that highlight an even greater fear — fear of totalitarianism. That’s a far greater threat to you and your children, by far. Try to appeal to people’s memory. Remind them of the freedoms they grew up with. Do they really want to be responsible for leaving their children with zero freedom to think and act for themselves?

Also, join with other dissenters into larger groups. This gives the larger majority who aren’t fully hypnotized but too fearful to go against the grain an alternative to going along with the totalitarians.

Lastly, start building parallel structures within your local communities that address the four underlying conditions that allowed mass formation psychosis to develop in the first place, namely poor social bonding, lack of meaning in life, free-floating anxiety and discontent, and free-floating frustration and aggression.

A parallel structure is any kind of business, organization, technology, movement or creative pursuit that fits within a totalitarian society while being morally outside of it. Once enough parallel structures are created, a parallel culture is born that functions as a sanctuary of sanity within the totalitarian world.

By rebuilding society, starting locally, into one where people feel connected and valued, the foundational psychological conditions for totalitarianism are undermined and ultimately eliminated. That’s the grand challenge facing all of us.

SC249-3

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56960.htm

Another Nail in the U.S. Empire’s Coffin… Biden Signs $770 Billion War Budget  

As this year ends, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law military spending of $770 billion. That’s just for the next year alone. The scale of wastefulness and bloated corruption is eye-watering. It eclipses what the United States is willing to invest for overhauling its badly neglected civilian infrastructure and for combating the coronavirus pandemic that has killed far more people in the U.S. than in any other nation.

If there is one thing that portends a historic collapse of U.S. global power it is its pathological addiction to militarism that is hemorrhaging vital resources.

What is also amazing is how this gargantuan deformity in economic planning is presented as somehow rational and normal by the Western media.

Three decades after the Cold War officially ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for annual expenditure on its armed forces.

Biden’s budget – his first as president – exceeds the record set by the previous Trump administration for military largesse of $740 billion.

So much for wishing humanity peace and prosperity – as is the international tradition at this time of year – when the U.S. allocates such a grotesque amount of resources to the means of war and annihilation.

This obscene expenditure is not in any way conceivably a “defense budget” as it is termed in Orwellian newspeak. It is a dreadful and despicable war budget.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 11 top nations combined. Compared with China ($250bn) the U.S. budget is nearly three times bigger. The U.S. spends over 12 times more than Russia ($60bn) on its armed forces.

Those figures alone tell beyond any doubt which nation is the ultimate aggressor. Yet, farcically, the Western corporate media in Orwellian fashion portray China and Russia as the aggressors against whom the United States is “defending’ the rest of the world.

Biden’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as it is formally titled, devotes billions more to devising new nuclear weapons and to provoke China and Russia. Camouflaged with Orwellian rhetoric, there is some $7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” and $4 billion for the “European Defense Initiative”.

The Biden administration has committed a further $300 million in military support for Ukraine over the next year. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in arms that Washington has plowed into Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 which brought to power a Russophobic regime.

Next week, U.S. and Russian officials are to hold negotiations in Geneva to deescalate tensions over Ukraine and Europe generally. It is blindingly obvious that the crisis over security has been created by the United States pushing a policy of militarizing Europe against Russia in the form of expanding the NATO alliance all the way to Russia’s borders.

With twisted logic, Moscow is accused of “threatening” Ukraine and European security even though its troops are on Russian soil and it is American weapons that are encroaching on Russia’s territory.

The inordinate military spending by the United States year after year is proof of the source of international tensions.

When the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991 following the demise of the Soviet Union, there was a reasonable expectation around the world for a “peace dividend” to ensue. That is, whereby Cold War militarism would at last give way to peaceful economic development and cooperation. How lamentable the disappointment!

The inescapable fact is that the U.S. economy is a war-driven system. The military-industrial complex at the heart of American capitalism is dependent on massive taxpayer-funded financial subvention. If an economy is driven for war, then it follows that conflicts and wars are inevitable. This is why, 30 years after the supposed end of the Cold War, the United States is closer to starting a war with Russia and China than ever before.

In an insightful interview this week, former United Nations diplomat Alfred Maurice de Zayas condemned what he called the “universal provocation” of the US “war budget”. De Zayas points out that the United States is preeminently guilty of undermining global peace and security. Its relentless militarism compels other nations to spend excessively on defense in order to counter the threat posed by the United States. Both China and Russia have long-proposed multilateralism and “win-win” cooperation. Neither of these nations has threatened the United States. It is always the U.S. with its mixture of paranoia and hubris that constantly portrays others as enemies and existential dangers. Again, that is due to the need for justifying the abomination of American military orgy year after year.

The truth is the United States has been at war against the rest of the world since at least the end of the Second World War. For most of that period, the Cold War, Washington cited the threat of Soviet and Chinese communism. It waged wars in dozens of countries on every continent killing tens of millions of people purportedly in the “defense of democracy and the free world”. How godawful ridiculous is that?

The Cold War was supposed to have ended, yet the U.S. continues its remorseless warmongering. It retreated from Afghanistan this year after two decades of futile war, only to now wind up tensions with Russia and China. The pretexts and excuses change over the decades, but the fundamental story remains the same: the United States is at war with the rest of the world in the vain ambition of exerting hegemonic domination. Arguably, that’s an essential definition of fascism.

But it’s not just against the rest of the world that the U.S. rulers are waging war. They are waging war against their own American citizens. The Washington elite of both parties (comprising the de facto War Party) whistle through a military budget funded by taxpayers that dwarves anything the federal government is prepared to spend on societal infrastructure and decent human development.

Far above any other nation, the U.S. has a pandemic killing nearly 850,000 people so far and there is no end in sight. U.S. rulers refuse to allocate more financial help to the population to defeat the pandemic yet they are planning to spend billions on offensive weapons systems to threaten Russia and China.

The hideously perverse priorities of the United States as demonstrated by its wanton militarism are a portent and ultimate cause of its historic failure. It is a vile disgrace that the apparent solution to its inherent contradictions is to start a catastrophic war. Fortunately, Russia and China are strong enough militarily to not let that happen. And so the outcome we will witness more of over the coming year will be the United States cratering from its own internal corruption.

....

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/01/05/meta-censors-anti-imperialist-speech-in-obedience-to-the-us-government/

Meta Censors Anti-Imperialist Speech In Obedience To The US Government

Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.

Go ahead and read the thread; here’s the hyperlink again. There’s nothing in there that comes anywhere remotely close to violating Instagram’s terms of service as they are written; Medhurst condemns the assassination and the bogus justifications provided for it, and discusses Soleimani’s crucial role in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda. The reason for Instagram’s censorship of Medhurst’s political speech is that Instagram’s parent company Meta (then called Facebook) determined after Soleimani’s assassination that anything which seems supportive of him constitutes a violation of US sanctions and must therefore be removed.

In 2019 the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, which was as hypocritical and arbitrary as any other government designating any other branch of another government’s military a terrorist organization. Despite this completely baseless designation, both the Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have been actively censoring political speech about Soleimani, who was the commander of the IRGC’s Quds force when he was assassinated. Medhurst reports that he has been censored on Instagram under the same justification for posting about Hamas as well.

We don’t talk enough about how completely insane it is that a social media company with billions of users is censoring worldwide political speech about a major historical figure in alignment with US government decrees. Even if you were to accept the ridiculous justifications for designating a branch of the Iranian military a terrorist organization, and even if you were to accept it as perfectly sane and normal for a communications company of unprecedented influence to take its marching orders on censorship from US government dictates, Soleimani is dead. He’s a dead man, he could not possibly pose any threat to anybody, and yet they’re censoring people from voicing opinions about his assassination.

I think I’ve been failing to appreciate the madness of this situation over the last two years because it’s simply too crazy to take in all at once. You have to really sit with it a minute and let it absorb. This is a person who shaped the world, whose impact on human civilization will be studied for generations. And the largest social media company on earth is actively censoring discussion about him because the US government said it’s not allowed.

Whenever I talk about the dangers of online censorship I always get a bunch of propagandized automatons bleating “It’s not censorship! Censorship is when the government restricts freedom of speech; this is just a private company enforcing its terms of service!”

This line of argumentation is plainly born of sloppy analysis. All the largest online platforms have been working in conjunction with the US government to censor speech, and doing so with greater and greater degrees of intimacy. A monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporation censoring political speech about an important historical figure because the US government says he was a terrorist is about as brazen an act of government censorship as you could possibly come up with. The fact that that censorship is outsourced to a putatively private company is irrelevant.

The outsourcing of censorship to private corporations is just one more iteration of the way neoliberalism privatizes duties that would otherwise be done by the government. That’s all we’re seeing here. In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is government censorship.

The US government is the single most tyrannical and oppressive regime on this planet. It terrorizes entire populations and works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates, it has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions to preserve its unipolar domination of the planet, it imprisons and tortures journalists for exposing its war crimes, and it aggressively censors political speech around the world.

Every evil the US accuses other nations of perpetrating, it does on a far grander scale itself. It just does it under the pretence of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting terrorism, under cover of outsourcing and narrative management. It inflicts the most psychopathic acts of violence upon human beings around the world, but wraps it in a package of justice and righteousness. The US government is a blood-spattered serial killer wearing a plastic smiley face mask.

SC249-2

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/despotism_is_the_new_normal_looming_threats_to_freedom_in_2022

Despotism Is the New Normal: Looming Threats to Freedom in 2022

“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution.—Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America

Despotism has become our new normal.

Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy.

These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms.

This present trajectory is unsustainable. The center cannot hold.

The following danger points pose some of the greatest threats to our collective and individual freedoms now and in the year to come.

Censorship. The most controversial issues of our day—gay rights, abortion, race, religion, sexuality, political correctness, police brutality, et al.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support. Thus, while on paper, we are technically free to speak, in reality, we are only as free to speak as the government and tech giants such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow. Yet it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Unfortunately, censorship is just the beginning. Once you allow the government and its corporate partners to determine who is worthy enough to participate in society, anything goes.

The Emergency State. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves. Therein lies the danger of the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security. This is the power grab hiding in plain sight.

Pre-crime. The government is about to rapidly expand its policing efforts to focus on pre-crime and thought crimes. Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage. The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism, a broad label that can be applied to anything or anyone the government perceives to be a threat to its power.

The Surveillance State. This all-seeing fourth branch of government, comprised of a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors, watches everything we do, reads everything we write, listens to everything we say, and monitors everywhere we go. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.

Genetic privacy. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks, because the government—helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget)—has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

Bodily integrity. It doesn’t matter what your trigger issue is—whether it’s vaccines, abortion, crime, religion, immigration, terrorism or some other overtly politicized touchstone used by politicians as a rallying cry for votes—we should all be concerned when governments and businesses (i.e., the Corporate State) join forces to compel individuals to sacrifice their right to bodily integrity on the altar of so-called safety and national security. This debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccines to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

Gun control. After declaring more than a decade ago that citizens have a Second Amendment right to own a gun in one’s home for self-defense, the Supreme Court has now been tasked with deciding whether the Constitution also protects the right to carry a gun outside the home. Unfortunately, when it comes to gun rights in particular, and the rights of the citizenry overall, the U.S. government has adopted a “do what I say, not what I do” mindset. Nowhere is this double standard more evident than in the government’s attempts to arm itself to the teeth, all the while viewing as suspect anyone who dares to legally own a gun, let alone use one in self-defense. Indeed, while it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at, and killed.

Show Your Papers Society. With every passing day, more and more private businesses and government agencies on both the state and federal level are requiring proof of a COVID-19 vaccination in order for individuals to work, travel, shop, attend school, and generally participate in the life of the country. By allowing government agents to establish a litmus test for individuals to be able to engage in commerce, movement and any other right that corresponds to life in a supposedly free society, it lays the groundwork for a “show me your papers” society in which you are required to identify yourself at any time to any government worker who demands it for any reason. Such tactics can quickly escalate into a power-grab that empowers government agents to force anyone and everyone to prove they are in compliance with every statute and regulation on the books.

Singularity. Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Elon Musk has announced his intentions of implanting brain chips in humans sometime in 2022. The digital universe—the metaverse—is expected to be the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one. Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.

Despotism. Even in the face of militarism, fascism, technotyranny, surveillance, etc., the gravest threat facing us as a nation may well be despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money. The American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

It is a grim outlook for a new year, but it is not completely hopeless.

If hope is to be found, it will be found with those of us who do their part, at their local levels, to right the wrongs and fix what is broken. I am referring to the builders, the thinkers, the helpers, the healers, the educators, the creators, the artists, the activists, the technicians, the food gatherers and distributors, and every other person who does their part to build up rather than destroy.

“We the people” are the hope for a better year.

Until we can own that truth, until we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

In such a scenario, no one wins.

....

https://www.peakprosperity.com/why-2022-is-going-to-suck/

Why 2022 is Going to Suck  

A good friend called me up in tears last week.  “My dad just tested positive for Covid and has symptoms, and now that we’re home from Christmas, my kids are sick now too. What should I do?”

After we discussed the usual and ordinary early treatment options – which are as numerous as they are effective – her anger then swelled. “I hate the bastards that did this to my kids!”

She wasn’t referring to her immediate family, or really to any other ordinary citizens of her country. She wasn’t referring to people vaccinated or unvaccinated. She was referring to the people who created this virus leading to its eventual escape or release from the Wuhan lab to spread across the world.

It’s now completely obvious that not only was this a lab-manufactured virus, but that various companies, government officials and prominent virologists across the world were up to their proverbial eyebrows in having a hand in this self-inflicted disaster.

Instead of exploring this with full-throated abandon, the majority of the press in the U.S., Canada, and Europe chose to downplay the lab-escape hypothesis and inquiry for as long as possible. Even when they did look into it, finally, their efforts were weak and soon dropped in favor of juicier “scariant” (scary variant) stories.

Why was that? Wouldn’t you think that the fourth estate press would be keenly interested in exploring the genesis of the most powerful story of this century? The one thing that not only impacted the lives of nearly everyone on the planet, but their own personal lives as well?

I certainly thought so. But I was relegated to mainstream pariah status (zero interviews or requests for clarification from the MSM) despite having gotten the lab-leak story pretty much exactly correct in the spring of 2020.

I go into all of this as a matter of providing yet another early warning.

The same institutional failures on display in the lab-leak coverup/disinterest are riddled throughout every other major institution upon which your very life depends. So many once-credible institutions have been revealed to be intellectually compromised or morally corrupt. Or both.

The CDC? Corrupt and nearly worthless. The FDA? Even more so. The Federal Reserve? Ditto. The same is equally true for the institutional counterparts in too many countries. Again, mainly in western leaning countries. Oddly and notably, not Japan, not Vietnam, Korea, Africa, India…and the list goes on and (suspiciously) on.

Leaving that uncomfortable observation and its many implications aside, my main point is this: the people ostensibly running the show have absolutely risen well above their levels of actual competence.  It may seem like they know what they are doing, but only because the media has completely failed to ask the proper questions and the legal system no longer holds powerful feet to the fire.

The future is therefore easy to foretell. If left unchecked, it’s going to suck. Much worse than it needs to.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

The Federal Reserve is busy making it up as it goes along, printing and then printing more. It’s easy. Nobody complains. Later the Mother of All Bubbles blows up and everybody gets hosed. It’s entirely predictable and avoidable.

Administration after administration puts the very worst people into exactly the wrong spots. Ex-Goldman Sachs employees as Treasury Secretaries. Raytheon executives as Defense Secretary. Ex-pharma lobbyists as FDA directors.

Science and medicine become corrupted by rules and incentives that promote money over health and outcomes.

What’s required to turn all this around is for good people to once again rise up and say, “No More!” If we do, we can actually and truly turn all of this around. If we don’t, we will absolutely get what all of us can see coming.

The backdrop to this is that there’s an agenda running. When we clear our minds and hearts, we know that public health has not been anywhere near the top of the lists for any of the conflicted public health authorities in nearly all of the western countries.

These governments still do not promote vitamin D for all their citizens as a generalized immune boosting supplement offering enormous protective benefits against Covid (and many other illnesses). Why not?

These governments have gone to great lengths to block and even intercept Ivermectin shipments to their citizens despite clear signals that it is both very effective and incredibly safe. Why is that?

Well, we can’t know all the actual reasons why, because speculation as to intent is involved, but we can say for sure that these things have been happening. And that every time the CDC elevates a report or promotes a statistic each is invariably supportive of the central policy narrative of the moment. Every. Single. Time.

Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action.

If you needed any more convincing, consider this recent jaw-dropping headline:

Some math: 25% of all yearly deaths happen in the 18-64 category, and there are 3 million total yearly deaths in the US. That means the usual 750,000 deaths in this category ballooned to 1.05 million which means an extra 300,000 people died in this category in the U.S. This is a ball-park estimate because we are extrapolating this one insurer’s findings to the whole population, but directionally it is correct.

Is the CDC all over this explosive finding? Not as far as I can tell. I am unaware of any interest at all. Is the press on the job? No, not the mainstream press. As of this writing, that news has been out for two full days and not a single article has been written in a large mainstream news “source.”

The news is full of hospitals being full, but are they full of these 18–64-year-old victims who haven’t died but experienced some other mysterious ailment that began for some reason in the last year? People who are there maybe “with” Omicron but not there because of Covid?

These would be simple enough questions to answer with some honest inquiry. Inquiry that you and I both know isn’t going to happen.

At the very least, we should be asking ourselves – “why am I just hearing about this now, a year after the fact, from a life insurance company and not the CDC?  I thought they were responsible for tracking such things?” They are responsible, and they’re not doing it. Again, why not? In whose service are they, exactly, and what are their aims?

You know what? It doesn’t matter. Why? Because the very demonstration of such a level of complete rot tells us all we need to know. Those in power have completely lost the plot. The ship has no captain, and there are reefs ahead boiling with large waves.

It didn’t have to be this way.  But it is, and we have to deal with it as best we can.

Darker Before it Gets Brighter

Those of us with access to data know that Covid is terrible for people over the age of 70, but has an IFR equal to or less than the flu for those under 60. Yet that information has been squished and tortured to misrepresent the threat as if it applied equally to all people of all ages and all comorbidities. In other words, Covid has merely been an excuse to advance a larger agenda. If you are nodding your head in agreement, keep reading. If you are shaking your head side to side, I’m surprised you made it this far.

The same systemic corruption and institutional myopia that has infected the CDC and FDA is rampant within the SEC, the Federal Reserve, and many of our formerly respectable universities and colleges.

Which means it’s going to get darker before it gets brighter. How dark? It’s hard to say but the range I hold in my mind spans from “this is going to hurt” all the way to “it’s going to be the worst decline since the Romans pulled out of Europe.”

Eventually, there will be massive economic and financial crises, which are now unavoidable, but those don’t worry me quite as much as the food and energy shortages that are now highly likely.  And those don’t worry me quite as much as the tyranny that’s now afoot and gaining momentum with far too many gleeful advocates who seem to know nothing of history or humans.

That agenda of totalitarian control – once a mere fantasy plot line for fictional movies and books – is now a very obvious aim of many in power. Their seeming naivete about the positive roles of freedom, rights, and private initiative in the development of our shared prosperity is quite alarming, frankly. They seem to know nothing of the role of incentives in shaping behavior or about the complexity of economic systems. They didn’t even appreciate that maybe humans shouldn’t cavalierly monkey about with virus genetics, so how could they possibly care about other more mundane issues like the over-printing of money?....

SC249-1

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/crimes-against-our-country/

Crimes against Our Country

The year of sickening global psychosis ended with virologist and vaccine-uberspecialist Dr. Robert Malone truth-bombing the Internet with three hours of straight talk about the US health authorities’ campaign to destroy the lives of at least half a million US citizens (so far) and, leading by example, to harm multiples of that number of innocent people across all of Western Civilization. Podcaster Joe Rogan assisted skillfully in an interview that is finally rocking the world out of an epic consensus trance. (Listen.)

By health authorities I don’t just mean Dr. Anthony Fauci, the designated National SARS-CoV-2 Coordinator, or his accomplices in the Dept. of Health and Human Services agencies, CDC, NIH, NIAID, etc., but also the purblind US medical establishment of actual doctors in clinical practice, researchers, hospital administrators, and pharma executives who acted with a collective stupid malevolence not seen since the crematory-stuffers of the Nazi bureaucracy carried out their final solution.

We know what you did. You engineered and patented a gain-of-function virus at the same time you conspired with pharma companies to devise and patent pseudo-vaccines, and then you loosed both of them on the public. You didn’t just fail to adequately test the “vaccines” cooked up by Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, but you deliberately botched the trials and lied about it. You created rich $$ incentives for hospitals to mis-treat Covid patients by failing to use known, safe, effective anti-virals. You conspired with social and news media to suppress information about those common anti-viral drugs that would have informed many patients’ decisions and saved thousands of lives. You treated late-stage patients dying of Covid-induced vascular disorder with the ineffective and toxic drug remdesivir that Dr. Fauci had developed unsuccessfully for an ebola outbreak years ago. (Nurses turned so cynical about the remdesivir protocol that they nicknamed it “run-death-is-near.”) You prompted government officials to lockdown society, force useless masking, and now to coerce “vaccination” by threatening to deprive citizens of their livelihoods.

The US Supreme Court will entertain arguments this Friday, January 7, to enjoin against “Joe Biden’s” mandates to coerce “vaccination” in companies that employ more than a hundred people and a separate mandate forcing vaxxes on staff at Medicare / Medicaid certified “providers” (meaning most hospitals and doctors’ offices). There’s a pretty good chance the court will decide against the mandates. They’re expected to rule Monday, January 10, the day that the mandates are supposed to take effect.

The government’s actions around the Covid-19 event look more and more to be deliberately and maliciously intended to harm lives and cause social and economic breakdown. In the last weeks of 2021, federal public health officers even blocked shipments of monoclonal antibodies around the country, despite their proven efficacy. The CDC scheduled the use of PCR tests for Covid-19 to end on December 31, after declaring them unreliable in August. Why the five-month lag? (To keep case numbers jacked up, that’s why.)

Every effort is being made to extend emergency use authorizations for unsafe and ineffective “vaccines” in order to sustain shields against liability for the benefit of their manufacturers. Pfizer refuses to release in the USA its FDA-approved comirnaty version of the EUA-protected BioNTech product for that reason. The Pentagon has lied and confabulated its use of the two Pfizer products in order to illegally force unapproved BioNTech vaccinations on enlisted men and women. Hospital directors, doctors, and their professional associations continue to persecute colleagues who speak publicly against the “vaccines.” The “vaccine” makers refuse to disclose the exact contents of their products, and were permitted to withhold data on safety trials until a half-century into the future. The obvious conclusion is that they don’t want the public to be informed about any of this. The net effect is that medicine in the USA has destroyed its own authority. Who can trust his doctor knowing that they’ve gone along with all this epic dishonesty?

The country is heading into an agonizing reality-test at a scale and speed never seen before in world history. You can already assume that government has lost control of the Covid-19 story. The Omicron scare is failing miserably. Lots of cases, few deaths, mild symptoms. Government’s credibility is shot. In the months ahead, we’ll learn just how harmful those “vaccines” were — especially among American children — as deaths mount from damage done to people’s organs and immune systems.

The perfidious news media is scrambling now to adjust its narratives, but they won’t escape the record of falsehood they’ve sedulously laid down. They can’t delete or rewrite every story in their archives, and many of these are printed out in hard-copy anyhow. Next, they’ll try apologizing. (“Sorry, but the pandemic drove us a little nuts.”) That’s hardly enough. They have to answer in courts of law — or else we must just declare the USA a lawless state.

The Covid-19 crimes against our fellow citizens amount to only one piece of a package of reality-tests coming our way in 2022. Do you think Special Counsel John Durham skulked off to drink pina coladas in oblivion after indicting a couple of errand boys (Danchenko and Sussman)? He is a hypersonic force orbiting over a well-known cast of political criminals who are headed for prosecution. Next up will be the train wreck of the US economy. Do you think the crimes around the 2020 national election are buried and forgotten? You’re in for some harsh surprises. Things have truly flipped. You just don’t realize it yet.

....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56962.htm

US as primary source of terrorism

In a fervor of cross-partisan struggle and in pursuit of a bombshell, the New York Times was forced to publish hundreds of secret Pentagon records on innocent civilians that died due to reckless airstrikes conducted by the US military in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Flawed and handicapped US intelligence is a notion that the rest of the world is now getting used and alludes to when speaking about the intelligence agencies of the most ‘democratic’ but also the most aggressive nation in the world.

The never seen before documents, obtained by the newspaper, shows (other than deeply flawed intelligence), how the rushed and often imprecise targeting by warplanes or drones in West Asia occurred during the attacks and the murder of thousands of innocent civilians, many of them children. More than 1,300 secret reports are in the hands of the paper — more than 5,400 pages in total — and the time frame dates between September 2014 to January 2018.

The newspaper says it has conducted independent research of its own, and the results closely match much of the basic information from the Pentagon documents, but it found significant discrepancies and oversights by the Pentagon, including the location of the strikes or the number of people killed or injured following the attacks. The unveiled data on failed intelligence, faulty targeting, civilian deaths and bare-bones paperwork is at odds with boisterous Pentagon reports, which proves that in this case the US service-members had committed crimes falling under the jurisdiction of international law.

President Barack Obama is widely known as being the pioneer of US air wars following the disastrous invasion of Iraq and the number of American military casualties between 2003 till 2011— nearly 4,500 troops killed, some 900 contractors killed, and 32,000 soldiers injured, not including mental injuries. The public backlash against the Iraq war casualties was immense, with calls to bring the troops home growing louder by the day. In 2016, the former American president said, ‘with our extraordinary technology we’re conducting the most precise air campaign in history.’ But now it is become increasingly apparent and clear that president Obama fed the Americans and the international community with lies. The ‘extraordinary technology’ is conducting the most imprecise air campaign in history. The more than 50,000 US airstrikes between 2014 and 2019, which killed thousands and possibly tens of thousands of civilians, meant Obama’s initiative made the United States the judge of those civilians, their jury, and their executioner. In just one of the hundreds of examples documented by this research, in 2016, American special operations forces bombed what they allegedly believed were three Daesh (a terrorist organisation outlawed in Russia) ‘staging areas’ on the outskirts of a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. The official announcement reported at the time said that 85 terrorists were killed. The reality, as a result of the secret Pentagon documents and subsequent investigation shows, was that more than 120 innocent villagers were killed. No terrorists, just villagers, and bombs just fell on houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought night-time sanctuary from the bombings and the gunfire. The problem is Obama can’t be reached anymore to face accountability for the ‘peaceful’ initiative he started. Other American officials in the Pentagon share the same responsibility for intentionally under counting and under reporting civilian fatalities.

It is believed that this is just a tip of an iceberg. Over the past few months, revelations have slowly emerged about the nature of US airstrikes and the report suggests more will be revealed; which means the US state department will be working day and night to try and prevent that from happening. In September, The New York Times reported that a drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, which US officials insisted had destroyed a vehicle laden with bombs, had instead killed 10 members of the same family. Last month, The Times reported that scores of civilians had been killed in a 2019 bombing in Syria that the American military had intentionally hidden from the public eye. Now, the Times investigation has found that these were not one-offs but rather the regular casualties of a transformed way of a secret war that has gone wrong by bad intelligence or maybe deliberately.

The very policy of the White House to use international criminals clad in a general’s uniform and state department diplomats is despicable. In lieu of conducting a fair investigation and punishing the culprits responsible for killing innocent civilians, the ‘stout warriors’ are awarded medals and commended, promoted and receive some sweet monetary bonuses. Meanwhile, those warriors write memoirs bragging about how they had been exterminating civilians. Barbarians. No other word comes to mind.

In the wake of the US airstrike that killed 10 Afghan civilians, the Amnesty International said: ‘The US must now commit to a full, transparent, and impartial investigation into this incident. Anyone suspected of criminal responsibility should be prosecuted in a fair trial. Survivors and families of the victims should be kept informed of the progress of the investigation and be given full reparation’.

No trial, however, took place. And it never will, the author should add. How is it possible to persecute such citizens of the ‘great democracy’? They have always skirted responsibility. Having landed on the American shores, their ancestors brutally murdered hundreds of millions of indigenous people, Native Americans, to whom this country rightfully belonged. And did any of the founding fathers suffer punishment for this? Come to think of it, when the indigenous people are exterminated, it is usually called a genocide. But, like their ancestors, representatives of the US military and political establishment have got into habit of genociding other peoples. Their ‘great democracy’ philosophy is to bomb out and conquer other peoples’ lands, to appropriate their wealth. This is not the mentality of normal people; it is a criminal, dog-eat-dog mentality.

The Times reported that in this case, in Kabul, ‘the US military was only forced to admit to its failure in this strike because of the current global scrutiny on Afghanistan. Many similar strikes in Syria, Iraq, and Somalia have happened out of the spotlight, and the US continues to deny responsibility while devastated families suffer in silence. The US must ensure that it ends unlawful strikes, consistently and thoroughly investigates all allegations of civilians harmed in attacks, and publicly discloses its findings.’

US administrations come and go, but they consistently and deftly designate other countries as ‘state sponsors of terrorism’. But the thing is that the United States itself is the state sponsor of terrorism. There is abundant evidence that can be found in the US media about Washington’s acts of state terrorism. It was the United States — and it is a well-known fact — that was the cradle of terrorism; you only have to look at their barbaric actions in numerous countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. By the way, who created al-Qaeda and Daesh, terrorists organisations that are banned in Russia? Was not that the ‘democratic’ United Stated?

American explosions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and so on brought only death and destruction, but not the publicly stated goal of promoting ‘peace and security’. In the beltway there is widespread belief that the US military ‘under reported’ the actual number of civilian casualties. The recent revelations, however, tell an absolutely different story; a story of Washington trying to cover up its own investigations, and now the world knows why. The Times reporters visited more than 100 casualty sites in three countries, interviewed victims’ family members and showed, what analysts say, is just a small fraction of reality.

However, as the latest report says, the US continues these barbarian policies as US service-members sit in front of giant LCD screens pressing buttons to drop bombs, like in a video game. But unlike video games, their goals are real, and their deadly strikes have already killed a lot of people in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries. Washington has been getting away with these crimes while Pentagon is still trying to downplay its terrorist activities. Until now, fewer than 20 of these assessments dating to late 2014 have been made public. It is high time to bring these terrorists to justice and to shield countries from these terrorist activities and to restore order in the world.

SC248-15

http://patricklawrence.us/patrick-lawrence-putin-speaks/

Putin Speaks

Vladimir Putin was “defiant” during his end-of-year press conference last Thursday. The Russian president, who has held these impressive question-and-answer events for the past 20 years, was “bellicose.” He was “threatening.” So we read in the all-the-same-always American press.

Here’s a gem from one Mary Ilyushina, a CBS News correspondent in Moscow: Putin is worried about the military activities of NATO members in Ukraine, she tells us, “you know, on Russia’s doorstep, which is what Putin believes Ukraine is.”

Putin believes. Got it. Mary Ilyushina, my nominee for president of the Overseas Press Club. I have other words for Putin’s performance before 500 domestic and international journalists, and it is far more pertinent to our circumstances. Putin was confident. He was clear, well-informed per usual, and meant neither more nor less than what he said.

I realize it is difficult for us, we Americans, to comprehend a political figure who is clear, well-informed, and means what he or she says. But this is what is noteworthy about Putin’s four-hour appearance. This is what’s worth our consideration.

Putin’s year-end presser, the Kremlin transcription of which is here, follows a series of developments that, in my read, has set in motion a profound shift in East–West relations as these play out along Russia’s border with Europe and across the Eurasian landmass.

“Putin wants to restructure the whole security architecture of Europe,” Mary Ilyunshina reported. Dead on this time, Mary. While Putin articulated no such thought, this is a serviceable summary of exactly his intent.

It is difficult to say just when the train of events now playing out between Washington and Moscow began. One can go back to the “civil society” funding the U.S. began sending Ukraine in the early post–Cold War years. But good enough here to mark down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Sept. 1 summit with President Joe Biden as the occasion that set this recent phase in motion. 

NATO & Ukraine 

Zelenskyy wanted assurances that the Biden regime would hold his hand as he continued to ignore Ukraine’s Minsk II commitments and stoked increasing tensions with Russia. He got that. But he didn’t get what he truly came for: As noted in this space at the time, Biden stopped well short of any commitment to advance Ukraine toward membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

I may have misread that occasion as more of a setback than it was for the corrupt, Nazi–supported Russophobes running the Kiev regime.

What has since ensued leaves NATO membership well in the distance, but there are treaty documents and there are weapons shipments, infrastructure contracts, foreign mercenaries, purposeful naval provocations, and assorted other “facts on the ground.”

So far this year the Biden regime has approved $450 million is security assistance to Ukraine, bringing the total allotted since the U.S. inspired the February 2014 coup in Kiev to $2.5 billion.

During their Oval Office sit-down, Biden stayed awake long enough to promise Zelenskyy $60 million more in small arms, ammunition and radar systems. This materiel began arriving on Dec. 10 and will continue into the new year. Beyond that more, surely.

Britain is now at work constructing two naval ports along Ukraine’s Black Sea shoreline; in October the U.K. agreed to lend Kiev $1.6 billion to pay for an assortment of British-made naval vessels, some new, some outdated scows of the kind the West typically sells the non–West.

U.S. and British naval maneuvers off Russia’s Black Sea coast are now routine. Western military officials now talk of deploying potent new technology, all the way up to nuclear-capable missiles, along the alliance’s Russia-facing eastern front. We now have Russian reports that British mercenaries have joined the forces from NATO members already deployed in Ukraine. The numbers Russia is (unofficially) putting out: 10,000 troops and mercs from NATO members on Ukrainian soil, 4,000 from the U.S.

NATO–schmATO, if you see what I mean. The thought in Washington, London and Brussels seems to be, Well, we can’t put Ukrainian membership to paper —that might be a provocation too far — but, the hell with it, we can treat Kiev as more or less a member anyway.

Since the autumn we have had incessantly alarmist reports that the Russian Federation is amassing troops and materiel in its western region near the border with Ukraine. I read everything from 60,000 Russian soldiers to 175,000. Who knows? Maybe none, maybe the higher number (or higher than the higher number).
The Pentagon & Press  

Our only certainty is that we cannot logically take the word of the Pentagon and its clerks in the press for what Russia is doing (on its own soil).

Be alert, readers! The West provoked the Cold War, left its provocations out and blamed Stalin’s Soviet Union for all that followed. The U.S. cultivated the coup in Ukraine seven years ago, left out copious evidence of this, and blamed Russia for reincorporating Crimea to protect its naval base on the Black Sea from the new crazies in Kiev.

Same thing once again. This latest crisis over the Ukraine question is the West’s doing, and — forgive the lapse here, please — the bullshitters in Washington are once again selling most of us on the idea that Russia is the aggressor. 

I am reminded of that wonderful moment amid the earlier phase of the Ukraine crisis when John Kirby, then as now the not-too-bright Pentagon spokesman, complained to Matt Lee, the Associated Press’s able diplomatic correspondent, that Russia was too close to NATO’s eastern borders.

Everybody has to be someplace, as the old saying goes.

Everyone in Washington knows, just as you and I know, that Russia has no intention of “invading” Ukraine. This is merely the cover story blurring, in Washington’s seven-decade tradition, cause and effect.

When Biden asked for a video conference with Putin earlier this month, it looked to me as if our addled president wanted to come away saying, I talked tough and he retreated.

Six days after the two leaders’ video encounter, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, handed his American counterpart two draft treaties that Moscow proposes as the basis of a comprehensive agreement to deescalate the dangerous situation Washington has assiduously conjured along Russia’s western frontier.  One is a bilateral accord between Washington and Moscow; the other is a draft accord Russia and all NATO members would sign.

Unusually, the foreign ministry in Moscow published both documents two days after Ryabkov handed them to Assistant Secretary of State Karen Donfried. This was astute on Russia’s part: It leaves no room for Washington to misrepresent the Russian position. It also conveys the extent to which Russia intends to hold to its position even as it looks forward to negotiations in Geneva after the year turns.

Said position in sum:

    NATO will cease all efforts to expand eastward, notably into Ukraine and Georgia.
    NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missile batteries in nations bordering Russia.
    An end to NATO military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.
    The effective restoration of the treaty covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons. The U.S. — yet again blaming Russia — abandoned the INF pact in August 2019.
    An ongoing security dialogue.

The talk in Washington and Brussels now is that these proposals are entirely unreasonable and that Russia understands this without saying so. The thought that Russia’s position is entirely unreasonable is … entirely unreasonable. Whether or not Moscow expects to negotiate down from these stipulations is an outstanding question. 

Moscow Is Serious 

Moscow’s seriousness is not. I was struck last Friday to find no less a figure than the nonagenarian Michail Gorbachev, who was famously betrayed on the NATO question as the Soviet Union gave way, laying into the U.S. during an interview with RIA Novosti for provoking the current crisis in Ukraine out of sheer “arrogance and empire-building.”

Here is how Putin put it in his press conference last Thursday:

    “We have made it clear that any further movement of NATO to the East is unacceptable. Is there anything unclear about this? Are we deploying missiles near the U.S. border? No, we are not. It is the United States that has come to our home with its missiles and is already standing at our doorstep. Is it going too far to demand that no strike systems be placed near our home? What is so unusual about this?”

This is what I mean by confidence. In Putin’s diction I read a determination to protect Russia’s interests in the face of what the U.S. and its European satellites have turned into something approaching an existential challenge. Washington has given Putin no choice as it has turned up the heat — as it has aggressed — since the Biden–Zelenskyy summit. Moscow has taken its only alternative.

Corollary: Years ago, the late Stephen Cohen taught me to distinguish between spheres of influence, which we agreed was a 19th century terminology, and spheres of security, which are a 21st century reality. In effect, Washington is talons-out vigilant in guarding its own security perimeters — imperially defined as these are — while insisting there is no need to observe anyone else’s.

There are a couple of other factors to consider here.

One, as Moscow understands, along with what sane heads there may be in Washington, it is inconceivable that the West in any formation — via NATO, via the U.S. and Britain alone — could prevail in an armed confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. As my colleague Marshall Auerback has astutely argued, in this respect NATO’s recent belligerence on the Ukraine question, being ultimately impotent, will stand in history as the alliance’s Waterloo. Halle-damn-lujah if this proves so.

Two and more broadly, there is the question of history’s arc. Putin, having an active mind and a grasp of the moment — and how weird is this to Americans? — appears to understand that the Eurasian landmass, from Shanghai to Lisbon, is emerging as something like humanity’s new center of gravity (which marks a return of sorts).

Does Putin propose to restructure “the whole “European architecture of Europe?” In my mind he sees this as inevitable and thinks it is time to get on with it. Mary Ilyushina implies this is reckless, weird, unthinkable. It is none of these. We ought to celebrate the insight.

Europe, in other words, will increasingly understand itself as the western end of Eurasia as against the eastern shore of the Atlantic. Is it a coincidence that the Russian leader, a week after the video encounter with Biden, had a similar summit-via-video with Chinese President Xi Jinping that turned out to be the strongest affirmation to date of the alliance-like relationship between Moscow and Beijing?

I don’t think so.

In this connection, I loved the head on a story The Hill published after the Putin-Xi meeting. “‘Allies’ China and Russia Are Ganging Up on America,” it read. It takes a little fun out of it that Gordon Chang wrote the piece, given that the blindingly Sinophobic Chang is always wrong about anything to do with China. But still, good for a chortle.

Nobody’s ganging up on anybody, Gordy. It’s the turning of history’s wheel. Can’t you hear it slowly creaking away?

....

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/01/03/those-who-support-internet-censorship-lack-psychological-maturity/

Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.

In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.

I myself had already written many, many articles warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world. 

We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.

“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the social media giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten progressively more intimate, so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the will of the most powerful government on earth.

The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.

It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this. I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, hate them. They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so they’d often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn’t really be more opposed.

When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating. I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and, if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing. But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I personally receive from their absence.

I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.

This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn’t require a lot of maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare in some circles.

SC248-14

https://scheerpost.com/2021/03/02/hedges-the-age-of-social-murder/

The Age of Social Murder

 

The two million deaths that have resulted from the ruling elites mishandling of the global pandemic will be dwarfed by what is to follow. The global catastrophe that awaits us, already baked into the ecosystem from the failure to curb the use of fossil fuels and animal agriculture, presage new, deadlier pandemics, mass migrations of billions of desperate people, plummeting crop yields, mass starvation and systems collapse. 

The science that elucidates this social death is known to the ruling elites. The science that warned us of this pandemic, and others that will follow, is known to the ruling elites. The science that shows that a failure to halt carbon emissions will lead to a climate crisis and ultimately the extinction of the human species and most other species is known to the ruling elites. They cannot claim ignorance. Only indifference.

The facts are incontrovertible. Each of the last four decades have been hotter than the last. In 2018, the UN International Panel on Climate Change released a special report on the systemic effects of a 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperatures. It makes for very grim reading. Soaring temperature rises — we are already at a 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.16 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels — are already baked into the system, meaning that even if we stopped all carbon emission today, we still face catastrophe. Anything above a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius will render the earth unhabitable. The Arctic ice along with the Greenland ice sheet are now expected to melt regardless of how much we reduce carbon emissions. A seven-meter (23-foot) rise in sea level, which is what will take place once the ice is gone, means every town and city on a coast at sea level will have to be evacuated. 

Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, whose nonviolent acts of mass civil disobedience offer the last, best chance to save ourselves, lays it out in this video: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C63FNN_o6Wc&feature=emb_logo

As the climate crisis worsens, the political constrictions will tighten, making public resistance difficult. We do not live, yet, in the brutal Orwellian state that appears on the horizon, one where all dissidents will suffer the fate of Julian Assange. But this Orwellian state is not far away. This makes it imperative that we act now.

The ruling elites, despite the accelerating and tangible ecological collapse, mollify us, either by meaningless gestures or denial. They are the architects of social murder.  

Social murder, as Friedrich Engels noted in his 1845 book “The Condition of the Working-Class in England,” one of the most important works of social history, is built into the capitalist system. The ruling elites, Engels writes, those that hold “social and political control,” were aware that the harsh working and living conditions during the industrial revolution doomed workers to “an early and unnatural death:” 

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.^” 

— Friedrick Engels, “The Condition of the Working-Class in England”

The ruling class devotes tremendous resources to mask this social murder. They control the narrative in the press. They falsify science and data, as the fossil fuel industry has done for decades. They set up committees, commissions and international bodies, such as UN climate summits, to pretend to address the problem. Or they deny, despite the dramatically changing weather patterns, that the problem even exists. 

Scientists have long warned that as global temperatures rise, increasing precipitation and heat waves in many parts of the world, infectious diseases spread by animals will plague populations year-round and expand into northern regions. Pandemics such as HIV/AIDS, which has killed approximately 36 million people, the Asian flu, which killed between one and four million, and COVID-19, which has already killed over 2.5 million, will ripple across the globe in ever more virulent strains, often mutating beyond our control. The misuse of antibiotics in the meat industry, which accounts for 80 percent of all antibiotic use, has produced strains of bacteria that are antibiotic resistant and fatal. A modern version of the Black Death, which in the 14^th century killed between 75 and 200 million people, wiping out perhaps half of Europe’s population, is probably inevitable as long as the pharmaceutical and medical industries are configured to make money rather than protect and save lives....

....What is taking place is not neglect. It is not ineptitude. It is not policyfailure. It is murder. It is murder because it is premeditated. It is murder because a conscious choice was made by the global ruling classes to extinguish life rather than protect it. It is murder because profit, despite the hard statistics, the growing climate disruptions and the scientific modeling, is deemed more important than human life and human survival. 

The elites thrive in this system, as long as they serve the dictates of what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine,” the convergence of science, economy, technics and political power unified into an integrated, bureaucratic structure whose sole goal is to perpetuate itself. This structure, Mumford noted, is antithetical to “life-enhancing values.” But to challenge the megamachine, to name and condemn its death wish, is to be expelled from its inner sanctum. There are, no doubt, some within the megamachine who fear the future, who are perhaps even appalled by the social murder, but they do not want to lose their jobs and their social status to become pariahs.  

The massive resources allocated to the military, which when the costs of the Veterans Administration are added to the Department of Defense budget come to $826 billion a year, are the most glaring example of our suicidal folly, symptomatic of all decaying civilizations that squander diminishing resources in institutions and projects that accelerate their decline.  

The American military — which accounts for 38 percent of military spending worldwide — is incapable of combating the real existential crisis.  The fighter jets, satellites, aircraft carriers, fleets of warships, nuclear submarines, missiles, tanks and vast arsenals of weaponry are useless against pandemics and the climate crisis. The war machine does nothing to mitigate the human suffering caused by degraded environments that sicken and poison populations or make life unsustainable.  Air pollution already kills an estimated 200,000 Americans a year while children in decayed cities such as Flint, Michigan are damaged for life with lead contamination from drinking water. 

The prosecution of endless and futile wars, costing anywhere from $5 to $7 trillion, the maintenance of some 800 military bases in over 70 countries, along with the endemic fraud, waste and mismanagement by the Pentagon at a time when the survival of the species is at stake is self-destructive.  The Pentagon has spent more than $67 billion alone on a ballistic missile defense system that few believe will actually work and billions more on a series of dud weapons systems, including the $22 billion Zumwalt destroyer. And, on top of all this, the U.S. military emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions between 2001 and 2017, twice the annual output of the nation’s passenger vehicles.

A decade from now we will look back at the current global ruling class as the most criminal in human history, willfully dooming millions upon millions of people to die, including those from this pandemic, which dwarf the murderous excesses of the killers of the past including the Europeans that carried out the genocide of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Nazis that exterminated some 12 million people, the Stalinists or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. This is the largest crime against humanity ever committed. It is being committed in front of us. And, with few exceptions, we are willfully being herded like sheep to the slaughter.

It is not that most people have faith in the ruling elites. They know they are being betrayed. They feel vulnerable and afraid. They understand that their misery is unacknowledged and unimportant to the global elites, who have concentrated staggering amounts of wealth and power into the hands of a tiny cabal of rapacious oligarchs. 

The rage many feel at being abandoned often expresses itself in a poisoned solidarity. This poisoned solidarity unites the disenfranchised around hate crimes, racism, inchoate acts of vengeance against scapegoats, religious and ethnic chauvinism and nihilistic violence. It fosters crisis cults, such as those built by the Christian fascists, and elevates demagogues such as Donald Trump. 

Social divisions benefit the ruling class, which has built media silos that feed packaged hate to competing demographics. The greater the social antagonisms, the less the elites have to fear. If those gripped by poisoned solidarity become numerically superior — nearly half of the American electorate rejects the traditional ruling class and embraces conspiracy theories and a demagogue — the elites will accommodate the new power configuration, which will accelerate the social murder. 

The Biden administration will not carry out the economic, political, social or environmental reforms that will save us. The fossil fuel industry will continue to extract oil. The wars will not end. Social inequality will grow. Government control, with its militarized police forces of internal occupation, wholesale surveillance and loss of civil liberties, will expand. New pandemics, along with droughts, wildfires, monster hurricanes, crippling heat waves and flooding, will lay waste to the country as well as a population burdened by a for-profit health care system that is not designed or equipped to deal with a national health crisis.

The evil that makes this social murder possible is collective. It is perpetrated by the colorless bureaucrats and technocrats churned out of business schools, law schools, management programs and elite universities. These systems managers carry out the incremental tasks that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death work. They collect, store and manipulate our personal data for digital monopolies and the security and surveillance state. They grease the wheels for ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They write the laws passed by the bought-and-paid-for political class. They pilot the aerial drones that terrorize the poor in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan. They profit from the endless wars. They are the corporate advertisers, public relations specialists and television pundits that flood the airwaves with lies. They run the banks. They oversee the prisons. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps and medical coverage to some and unemployment benefits to others. They carry out the evictions. They enforce the laws and the regulations. They do not ask questions. They live in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without color,” the poet writes. “Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.”

These systems managers made possible the genocides of the past, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They kept the trains running. They filled out the paperwork. They seized the property and confiscated the bank accounts. They did the processing. They rationed the food. They administered the concentration camps and the gas chambers. They enforced the law. They did their jobs. 

These systems managers, uneducated in all but their tiny technical specialty, lack the language and moral autonomy to question the reigning assumptions or structures.

Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” writes that Adolf Eichmann was motivated by “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.” He joined the Nazi Party because it was a good career move. Arendt continued:

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.

The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.” 

Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”

The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants — just clerks.” This metaphysical ignorance fuels social murder.

We cannot emotionally absorb the magnitude of the looming catastrophe and therefore do not act. 

In Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary “Shoah,” he interviews Filip Müller, a Czech Jew who survived the liquidations in Auschwitz as a member of the “special detail., ”

“One day in 1943 when I was already in Crematorium 5, a train from Bialystok arrived. A prisoner on the ‘special detail’ saw a woman in the ‘undressing room’ who was the wife of a friend of his. He came right out and told her: ‘You are going to be exterminated. In three hours, you’ll be ashes.’ The woman believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and warned to the other women. ‘We’re going to be killed. We’re going to be gassed.’ Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders didn’t want to hear that. They decided the woman was crazy. They chased her away. So, she went to the men. To no avail. Not that they didn’t believe her. They’d heard rumors in the Bialystok ghetto, or in Grodno, and elsewhere. But who wanted to hear that? When she saw that no one would listen, she scratched her whole face. Out of despair. In shock. And she started to scream.  

Filip Müller to Claude Lanzmann, “Shoah”

How do we resist? Why, if this social murder is inevitable, as I believe it is, do we even fight back? Why not give in to cynicism and despair? Why not withdraw and spend our lives attempting to satiate our private needs and desires? We are all complicit, paralyzed by the overwhelming force of the megamachine and bound to its destructive energy by our allotted slots within its massive machinery.” 

Yet, to fail to act, and this means carrying out mass, sustained acts of nonviolent civil disobedience in an attempt to smash the megamachine, is spiritual death. It is to succumb to the cynicism, hedonism and numbness that has turned the systems managers and technocrats that orchestrate this social murder into human cogs. It is to surrender our humanity. It is to become an accomplice.

Albert Camus writes that “one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.” 

“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,” Camus warns. “But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.” 

The capacity to exercise moral autonomy, to refuse to cooperate, to wreck the megamachine, offers us the only possibility left to personal freedom and a life of meaning. Rebellion is its own justification. It erodes, however imperceptibly, the structures of oppression. It sustains the embers of empathy and compassion, as well as justice. These embers are not insignificant. They keep alive the capacity to be human. They keep alive the possibility, however dim, that the forces that are orchestrating our social murder can be stopped. Rebellion must be embraced, finally, not only for what it will achieve, but for what it will allow us to become. In that becoming we find hope.